To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Saturday, May 28, 2016

From Technicians of the Sacred Expanded: “The Age of Wild Ghosts” (Lolop'o [Yi], China)

Translated from Yi & Mandarin by Erik Mueggler[I have recently added the following to the
revised & expanded edition of Technicians
of the Sacred, still in progress. Its
place is in a new section of the book called “Survivals & Revivals,” as an
instance of old rituals of mourning & healing incorporating the threatening
ghosts of those killed by political & social violence in a very real &
contemporary local & national setting Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc.).
The work from which I’m drawing, The Age of Wild
Ghosts by Erik Mueggler (University
of California Press,
2001), is a still more complex & detailed report on what’s at stake here.
(J.R.)]

1/

Long ago the living could see the dead and
the dead could see the living. Living and dead both attended the market: on one
side of the street the dead sold their things; on this side the living sold
theirs; and the dead took the same form as the living. At that time they used copper money, not
paper. The dead used paper to stamp out
coins that looked just like the copper coins of the living, and with this money
they bought things from the living. But
the living were not to be trifled with.
They put the coins in a pan of water: the real coins made of copper
sank, and the paper coins made by the dead floated. They returned the false money to the dead,
and gradually the dead could no longer buy them from the living; they could buy
only from other dead. If your father
died, you could go to the market he next day and see him. But it was not permitted for living and dead
to speak to each other. The dead were
punished if they spoke to the living – their officials taxed and fined them –
and the living were afraid to speak to the dead. So living and dead could only look at each
other. Then, as now, the dead sometimes
harmed [literally “bit”] the living, but the living could beat the dead in
return, so the dead had no power over them.
Disgusted with this situation, the dead petitioned for a bamboo sieve to
be set up between them and the living.
The living could see the dead only vaguely, but the dead [being closer
to the sieve’s holes] could see the living clearly. The living did not like this, for the sieve
was too thick to beat the dead through.
The living were stupid: some say they asked for a paper screen to be
placed on their side of the street; they could beat the dead through the paper,
but they could not see them at all.

2/

ghosts of ridges attack

ghosts of gullies attack

descend from the sky

arise from the earth

pain floods her head

her
torso and her feet

of an entire family harmed

the harm centers on her bed

of
thirty of their men

thirty of their women

of all in this house

You
beat her head with clubs

shoot her breast with
crossbows

she can’t sleep a wink

can’t sit a moment

can’t stretch her legs

can’t lift her hands

her food won’t digest

her drink won’t stay down

her bones have no marrow

pain pierces her pupils

invades even her pupils

pain pierces her bone marrow

invades even her marrow

3/

some die bearing sons or daughters

some die with blood-dyed clothing

some die with blood-soaked groins

some die crushed by trees or stones

some die of hunger or thirst

some swell and explode

some hang and explode

some are stabbed or slashed

some trip and crush their heads

some die of loud shouts or big words

some are roasted by fire

some are swept away by floods

tile-roofed houses burn

thatched-roof huts burn

at work on the road

they step on mating snakes

at work on the mountain

crushed by falling trees

some have intestines ruptured by poison

4/

go over there to Beijing

your ghost kings live there

every day they hold meetings in Beijing

Lin Biao died in a plane crash

Jiang Qing hanged herself

your ghost king Lin Biao, go
follow Lin Biao

your king is over there

I shall lead you to Beijing

go to where your ghost friends live

go to where your ghost companions live

if the road returns don't you return

if the road strays don't you stray

(Lolop'o [Yi], China)

N.B. “A prominent leader of the
Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao died in a 1971 airplane crash while fleeing Beijing in the wake of a
failed attempt to assassinate Chairman Mao. Jiang Qing, Mao's wife and one of
the Cultural Revolution's notorious Gang of Four, was publicly tried in 1980
and sentenced to death, commuted later to life in prison. To people in this
mountain community, Jiang Qing and Lin Biao were the king and queen of the
violently dead. And, as the seat of their spectral government, Beijing was the ultimate geographical source
of all bodily afflictions attributed to memories of past violence.” (Erik
Mueggler, from “Spectral Subversions,” in Comparative Studies in
Society and History,
1999)

commentary

Source: Erik Mueggler, The
Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2001), passim.
The first song here was chanted by Luo Lizhu & the other two by Li Wenyi.

What emerges here,
within the framework of a traditional “minority” culture in China is the survival
of rituals of exorcism & healing, now incorporating “wild ghosts” as the
invasive spirits of those doomed both as perpetrators & as victims by the
violent actions of the central Chinese state, from the Great Leap Forward
(& subsequent famine) of the late 1950s, to the Cultural Revolution of the
1960s & 70s, to the era of Communist-sponsored state capitalism in the
present. For this a charged &
musical language – close to what we would think of as poetry – is again the
primary instrument, whose singers & makers continue to function as native
technicians of the sacred. The tension
here is between the local & traditional at home as against the imaginary
& distant in places of power like Beijing & Shanghai, for which the
“wild ghosts” of the recent dead – in the local village & in the distant
state – appear as both grim reminders & reawakened voices.

Writes Erik Mueggler elsewhere
of what he calls “the geography of pain” & “the age of the wild ghosts”: “In much of rural China, memories of past violence
are crucial to people's sense of their own relation to distant centers of state
power. In particular, memories of death from hunger during the Great Leap
famine (1958-61) and suicide during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) continue
to haunt people's imagination of state and nation in ways that those of us who
did not live through these devastations are only beginning to discover. Many of the diverse, non-Han, Tibeto-Burman
speaking communities scattered through the mountains of Southwest
China share traditions of poetic speech, explicitly intended to
deal with bodily afflictions attributed to spectral memories of the violently
dead.

“In a Lolop'o (officially Yi) minority community, where I did fieldwork
from 1991-1993, poetic speech is used to drive the ghosts of those who died of
hunger, suicide, or other violence out of the bodies of their descendants and
into the surrounding landscape. The
ghosts are driven along a specific route through surrounding mountain villages.
Their path eventually takes them down the nearby Jinsha river to the Changjiang
(Yangtze). They make these rivers their steeds, riding them across the empire's
breadth to the richly-imagined cities of Chongqing,
Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing.
En route, they are to feast on piles of meat and barrels of drink, buy
beautiful clothing in the markets, and hobnob with officials. The fragment of
one chanted exorcism [above], which finds the ghosts in Beijing – their penultimate destination
before they disperse into sea and sky – encapsulates [these] themes. ..

“(With the exception of proper names and terms for political meetings
and airplane crashes, spoken in Mandarin ..., [these chants are] in a
sub-dialect of the Central dialect of Yi.)”

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